Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Europeans: 'Obama administration put more pressure on its friends in the negotiations than on the Iranians'

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Europeans - particularly France - are having some buyer's remorse about the sellout to a nuclear Iran.

French President François Hollande ran into a
difficult question late last month about war and Iran. It’s time now to pay
attention to his answer.

Invited to dinner by members of the French
Presidential Press Association on July 27, the president was asked if he went
along with the contention of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, later voiced by President Barack Obama,
that war would inevitably follow rejection by the U.S. Congress of the nuclear
deal between the great powers and Iran.

Mr. Hollande, whose full-page photo on a French
magazine cover this week is headlined The Anesthetist, doesn’t do
alarmisme. He didn’t assert, as Mr. Obama so often has, that war is the
single alternative to the Iran nuclear agreement. No way.

My recollection of Mr. Hollande’s
response—jibing with that of the journalists seated to my left and right that
evening—is that he said disapproval by Congress meant new “uncertainty,” and
uncertainty in the Middle East could sometimes mean war.

A month later, this much is clear about the
approach of the other European parties to the deal: Neither German Chancellor
Angela Merkel nor
U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron
have made an explicit link between Congress’s possible September vote against
the agreement and anything resembling the Obama administration’s notions of
instant cataclysm.

After initially nodding “yes” to the deal, the
French have partially reverted to form reflecting their traditional hard-nosed
antinuclear proliferation position. It’s OK in Paris to acknowledge that the
accord is an oversold mediocrity, and its character nonhistoric. Mr. Obama’s
notions of co-opting a suddenly tranquilized Iran to embrace the Forces of Good
in the Middle East can get characterized as naive. American sanctions experts
say big French banks have informed them they are in no rush to return to
Iran.

Citing the profound weaknesses of an agreement
that allows controls over Iran to end after 15 years and the mullahs to keep an
absurdly high number of centrifuges, a French official told me he graded the
accord as C-plus. He expressed concern about America’s willingness over time to
continue paying the enormous expense of its vast Iranian surveillance
operations. And he also said that the deal’s concessions to Tehran made a
pressing reality of Saudi Arabia’s quest for an atomic weapon.

One of the toughest of the country’s hard-nosed
security experts, Bruno Tertrais, wrote last month in the Canadian newspaper Le
Devoir that “with pressure from the Obama administration” European negotiators’
original intent deteriorated from a rollback of Iran’s nuclear ambitions to
their containment.

Camille Grand, director of the Foundation for
Strategic Research—a think tank with a reputation for telling truths the French
government might prefer to avoid—told me how this slippage had come about. “From
2013 on,” he said, “the Americans gave the impression they wanted the deal more
than Iran did. The administration put more pressure on its friends in the
negotiations than on the Iranians.”

...

For now, even if there are French critics, there
is no political or governmental force actively fighting the deal. It creates the
impression of a French security establishment that will shoot from the cover of
the sidelines, yet isn’t mobilized to urge that the agreement be
renegotiated.

But shooting from the sidelines can still have
an effect. Consider the recent ado about reports that Jacques Audibert, Mr.
Hollande’s national security adviser, told a U.S. congressional delegation to
Paris in July that France, while supporting the deal overall, would view a move
by Congress to block the deal as manageable without causing a break between the
U.S. and Europe. Rep. Loretta Sanchez, a Democrat, described the conversation
later. Although the French denied her account, her colleagues on the delegation
affirmed it—and why would she concoct a story so inconvenient to a president of
her party anyway?

So how come didn’t France lie across the tracks
to block the accord? My explanation:Because an economically nonperforming President
Hollande couldn’t say “no” to French industry wanting a shot at new Iranian
contracts. Because France no longer musters the international political levers
to shoulder splendid isolation. And because it would not assume the cost of
being regarded as Benjamin Netanyahu’s single objective ally.

And now, French buyer’s remorse? In theory, a
bit. But not enough to try holding off on its own what France knows is a lousy
Iran nuclear deal.

Is anyone in Congress listening?

For the record, France opposed the 24-day wait period for inspections.

0 Comments:

Links to this post:

About Me

I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com